Why I Ghosted My Boyfriend and Best Friends

These are the last words typed to me by three people I thought would be in my
life forever, but who no longer feature at all after I took the decision to
write them out completely.

Ghosting—the act of ending a relationship by ignoring someone's
attempts at communication, or blocking them on social media—has gained a
deservedly shitty
reputation.
But it's exactly what
I did to my boyfriend and two best friends.

Before I start, let me just say that I know what it feels like
to have someone pull a Casper on you. I've done the casual dating thing and had
guys just evaporate after weeks of messages. It's cruel and cowardly and so replicating this action wasn't a
decision I took lightly. But I guess you could say my world view changed
somewhat after losing my dad to cancer last year, and finding that some
of my closest relationships had disintegrated.

Emily and Kate were two of my best friends growing up. From age 12 to 22, our friendship revolved around experiences over substance: festivals, parties, and the various lies we'd tell our parents to cover it all up. A desire to turn bad decisions into good stories kept us
pretty tight but our friendship was always one Snapchat away from oblivion. As teenagers
we must have ghosted each other three or four times on MSN and MySpace. But
things were different then—we'd just make up at school the next day, staging
a digital truce by re-adding each other when we got home.

But by the time we reached our 20s, we'd communicate with each
other so much online that we became unable to deal with the emotional fallout
of our lives in person. When my dad died, we hadn't seen each other for weeks. When neither of them reached out, I was upset. I realized our friendship didn't exist anymore.

When you hit the un-friend button as an adult—even though it's a petty, juvenile act—you're cementing the end of a friendship that you don't have time to mend in real life.

When I deleted them on Facebook and unfollowed them on Twitter
and Instagram, I knew there would be no going back—even though reversing the
process is pretty easy. Work and travel commitments on their end and grief and bitterness from me meant that we weren't going to bump into each other in the pub
or park like old times and pinky-promise never to piss each other off again. When
you hit the un-friend button as an adult—even though it's a petty, juvenile
act—you're cementing the end of a friendship that you don't have time to mend
in real life. Things just... go on, which is what has happened in my case. But I'd
be lying if I said that I didn't hope for a phone call or a knock on the door
afterwards.

Ghosting hasn't left me feeling liberated or brought me closure,
though. Instead, I'm left in a state of digital limbo. Knowing the girls as
well as I do, I'm certain they cyber-sleuth me like I do them, but the only way
to repair things now is to meet IRL because none of us want to be the first one to
send that add/follow notification. It's sad to think that the breakdown of a
combined 24 years of female friendship didn't warrant a face-to-face
conversation, but I'm still fucking angry at how cold they were when I needed
them.

I adopted a similar vanishing act when it came to ending a
relationship with my ex. We met online when I was traveling, desperate to
escape my dad's terminal illness. In retrospect, the situation was primed for
me to let the wrong person into my life. After eight months, I cut all ties, blocking him on Facebook, WhatsApp, Gmail, and Flickr and changing passwords when I realized he'd been creeping my accounts for months. I removed him from my life in the same
way I found him—with the click of a button.

It was easy to do as the majority of our relationship was conducted
online. We lived in separate time zones, thousands of miles apart. Unlike the
situation with my BFFs, we had no mutual friends and zero chance of bumping
into each other. Again, it was an indicator of how weak our relationship really
was. If you think you could actually ghost someone, you probably don't think
that much of them in the first place.

This year the Office of National Statistics declared Britain to be the loneliness capital of Europe. Maintaining relationships
online through messaging removes the negative barriers of social interaction,
speeds up intimacy, and makes us all think we're closer to one another, but in
actual fact, it strips away emotional attachment. Ghosting friends and partners
is indicative of the brittle nature of the bonds of association which keep our
generation constantly connected; we can swap people in and out of our lives
like profile pictures, especially when we don't have to hold ourselves
accountable to them in real life.

Ghosting did allow me to end terrible relationships, but it should
always be a last resort. It has generally amplified the feelings of grief I was already experiencing and left me feeling empty. I'm still haunted by the memories of
my dad's bear-like frame shrinking before my eyes, while the three people I
cared about were nowhere to be seen. If I learned anything last year it's
that nothing is constant. The ties to those you love are easily broken and the
arteries of family and friendship can be blocked off by anger, loss, and illness.
Surrounding myself with real-life, meaningful interactions is now more
important than ever.